While I was using Audacity, my computer shutdown a couple of times and when I went in to open my file again, I keep getting this message: “Audacity is already running. The system has detected that another copy of Audacity is running. Running two copies of Audacity simultaneously may cause data loss or may cause your system to crash. Use the New or Open commands in the currently running Audacity process to open multiple projects simultaneously.”
Audacity is not open and does not show up in my Force Quit Applications bar.
Looking online for a solution led me to trying to find an Audacity temp folder and though I have looked and tried various commands in Terminal, I have not been able to locate any temp Audacity folders under any name.
How can I fix this problem?
My OS version is 10.11.1
My Audacity version is 2.1.1.0
Yes it is probably an old “lock file” that is still present.
In Finder, Go > Go to Folder and type or paste:
~/Library/Application Support/audacity/
Click “Go”.
In the “audacity” folder that opens, open the “audacity.cfg” file in TextEdit and look for the line underneath [Directories] that starts with TempDir=. Carefully select and copy everything after the equals sign. Mine is var/folders/c0/8p18hd453p3_433cf9_595b40000gn/T/audacity-gale.
From Audacity 2.1.3, Audacity’s default temporary directory is at /Users//Library/Application Support/audacity/SessionData.
Then in Finder, Go > Go to Folder, paste in the path you copied and click “Go”.
In the folder that opens, delete the file “audacity-lock-”.
I did everything you said and it all worked. No more error message…
But Audacity won’t open now. I tried restarting my computer and nothing. When I click on a file or on the application itself, nothing happens. Down in the dock, the application bounces once and stops so it doesn’t even try to pretend it’s opening.